I'm your host, Jester. I've been an EVE Online player for about six years. One of my four mains is Ripard Teg, pictured at left. Sadly, I've succumbed to "bittervet" disease, but I'm wandering the New Eden landscape (and from time to time, the MMO landscape) in search of a cure.You can follow along, if you want...

Thursday, November 21, 2013

Outsource the hard work

So here's an interesting get-rich-quick sort of scheme that some of you might be amused by.

Back in August, faced with the more or less insurmountable problem of figuring out where the valuable moons were in an entire region, Marlona Sky hit upon a brilliant strategy. Instead of scanning every single moon around every single planet in every single system, his alternate solution was to only scan moons that had moon harvesting arrays nearby. The logic was simple and devastating: with so many sov-holding alliances treating moons as a valuable asset, he figured that someone, somewhere, had already learned where all the valuable moons were. Any moon that had a moon harvesting array was probably something worth investigating; any moon that didn't have one probably wasn't.

The only downside to his strategy is that he had to go and fly out into space to learn where the moon harvesting arrays were. That's a lot of work.

Suppose you're sitting on a nice big pile of Mobile Siphons. Where are the best places to put them? Well, it turns out that you can follow a variation on Marlona's strategy and you don't even have to undock (too much) to do it. If a Mobile Siphon gets killed in a system, particularly if there's a POS on the kill-mail, you can pretty well assume that there's a moon worth siphoning in that system.

It even turns out that Mobile Siphons are something that you can search for individually. Here are -- at the moment I'm writing this -- 169 Mobile Siphon kills.

It's safe to say that there's a POS in each of those systems with something worth siphoning. You can even pull up individual kill-mails and learn what the siphons were eating. Here's a system with a technetium moon. Here's a system with a neodymium moon. Here's a system with a dysprosium moon. You'll still have to go to that system and hunt around a bit for the right POS, of course. But 17 times out of 20, I'll bet if you find the POS with the right corp that killed the previous siphon and the POS has a moon harvesting array, that's the one you're looking for.

Interesting approach, although it is self selecting moons with vigilant POS owners. Another method for identifying money moons is to examine the killboard of a group, for specific time periods, involved in a regional war. EVE Kill will even parse the data for you. For example, check tower kills for CONDI, say for June/July - oh look, what could all those Fountain POS kills be about? ;-D

Player X decides he wants to siphon some ISK from an alliance moon.X finds a third party (or an alt) who will plant a siphon and give him a share of the income.Siphon gets exploded, killmail becomes publicAlliance enemies know which systems to look in.

Am I being thick about Siphons - I've played seriously in a long time, but doesn't the POS shoot at you while trying to anchor the siphon and when you try and empty it? Or are most POSs not armed any more?

Many moon POSes aren't armed. The ones that are armed take a long time to lock something small, like a stealth bomber. Warp to POS, decloak nearby, drag siphon into space, it'll start anchoring, warp off.

Jester, is there some way to end up sending you an email or something? Wanting to try to restart in EVE online with one of these cheap starter packs, and would like someone to get that 21 day early start in there.

Unless PL (for example) can figure out how to bot a siphon check with the cyno alt at the POS, which should be ludicrously easy. Set overview to siphons only. If there's anything in the overview (completely passive check, no clicks for CCP to detect) either raise an alarm or shoot it with a POS gun (two clicks).

If they had made you, for example, have to hack the siphon to reveal it to the POS guns then at least it would be harder to bot, although it would also be an even more tedious chore for the poor POS owners.

Again eve players thinking outside of the box, this never fails to surprise me.

Or though Jester i did have an interesting thought lately, how does the current state of eve compare to the original design concept, and if those who came up the that concept feel as if eve and the player base has meet or exceeded that original concept.

There is one bias in your deduction which is quite important: only the defended POSes are shown on the KB. These are albeit the ones which are not profitable (or much less, since they are defended). You want to hunt for the ones with no activity ... :))

Sooner or later, every moon will be graced with a siphon. Sooner or later, every siphon will be destroyed. Over time, this method can't help but identify every valuable moon in New Eden. If nothing else, alliance members will use alts to steal from their own alliances, wanting their SRP money in advance.

If the moon is producing anything worth siphoning, that means someone will eventually show up to collect whatever it's producing. Then the owner has a choice: - Blow up the siphon, letting the whole galaxy know what was in it. - Leave the siphon to keep siphoning.

Though I thought siphons could be emptied by anyone. Meaning the smart play is to empty the siphon, then blow it up.

It seems to me like this is a good way of finding out where good moons are. But it's not really a good way of finding out where to place siphons. Placing a siphon where one has just recently been killed is simply consigning it to the same fate.

Dotlan maps have a lot of false information in them. The killboards are much harder to falsify. I'm sure some enterprising folks may want to trap others by anchoring their own siphons, inserting expensive goo and blowing up the siphon. So when you go out of your way to set up your own siphon, all you get are farts (atmospheric gases if you prefer the polite word).

so.... you take the guff out of the siphon. no prob.OR. i like this better: you plant a goo filled tick on a adversary moon and destroy. that'll muddy the waters a bit. :ponders: will have to check the mechs on that. can siphons be scooped when loaded?

Most moons have more than one resource to begin with, but things like Atmospheric Gases aren't worth the time to take out of a silo and ship to Jita for sale. I imagine that quite a lot of pos owners will now online moon harvesters for all of the junk resources.

Then when someone siphons you they will get a lot of junk, you take back the good moon material and blow up the siphon leaving a kill mail full of worthless junk.

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